I don't necessarily mind losing. Sometimes it's my own darn fault—I bet against poor odds, discarded something I should have saved, didn't pay enough attention to the board, got sloppy trying to rush through a stage, etc. If I can blame myself for the failure, and learn from my mistakes for next time, I'm usually cool with it. If my opponent is simply better than me, I'm often okay with that, too. Provided I've played my best, I don't mind conceding to someone who has more experience or natural talent, so long as they're not being a jerk about winning. I can even live with the times when I should win, but my opponent gets lucky or bests me at a critical moment that turns the tide of the game. I play games to have fun; winning is merely a bonus, but one that should be both visible at all times, no matter how far out of reach it may be.

I have been losing a lot these past few weeks, and I'm getting tired of it. Pardon me for a few paragraphs as I get this tirade out of my system.

After spending hours trying to record the perfect 10-minute boss rush for my YouTube playthrough of Mega Man 7, I finally had a good, useable take...which I had to throw out when I discovered the video was unwatchably choppy: I had overlooked a single setting I always have in place before recording. After hours of retrying, I finally came up with an equally good take...which I had to throw out because being on Skype earlier that day had recalibrated my audio settings, so the clip was recorded without sound. As much as I enjoy MM7, I wasn't spending two days straight replaying the same 10-minute span of the game just for fun. I was playing to win, and I lost. Twice.

Having recently played 8-player Mario Party 7 with some friends, I've been on a Mario Party kick, trying to unlock more of what the games have to offer in advance of the next time we have guests over. My wife and I have both been chipping away at various games in the series, and we've discovered one critical flaw with the solo Story Modes: nearly all the 1 vs. 1 Duel games are a matter of button mashing or sheer luck, and the computer doesn't have to physically press the buttons on the controller, fight off button-mashing fatigue, or guess which rope is arbitrarily the right one to pull. Humans need to overcome their corporeal handicap before they can stand a chance against a computer opponent of supposedly equal skill. There's little joy in playing a game when the challenges are deliberately or—worse—unthinkingly rigged in favor of an opponent who should be able to hold their own.

Not even the mindless grinding of Mega Man X: Command Mission could provide me a break from losing. Now that I've beaten the main game, I'm off to clean up the last of the optional material—Force Metal recipes and Treasure Tokens and rare item drops. As close as I am to marking this game off my Backloggery as Completed, I've been willing to put in the extra hours to have another Mega Man game under my belt that I've played inside and out, especially when it's mostly a matter of following a checklist and waiting for enemies to drop rare items. Well, last night I spent something like an hour and a half going through different paths of the Eternal Forest, which is an enemy gauntlet with no save points in sight. Halfway through the last battle before the exit, my GameCube crashed. That lovely black screen with white text that instructs you to consult your manual to see what the problem is. Sorry, Nintendo; my manual's not going to tell me how to recover nearly two hours of gameplay and that rare item drop I'd been trying forever to get. I lost again.

Then I decided to try fighting the first of nine optional post-game bosses again. The first time I'd tried was a disaster: no matter how much damage my party pumped out, the boss was recovering to maximum health every round. Clearly, I would need to level up, and come back to the battle with my strongest characters using their strongest attacks right out of the gate. That's exactly what I did, and it helped—it took the boss two rounds, instead of one, to get back to max health. I lost again.

Unlike any other boss battle, there was no way to salvage this—a single turn doing anything other than railing on the boss, and you might as well have marched into the battle with half your health and all your Hyper Mode activations exhausted. Like that accursed Neo Shinryu dragon boss in Final Fantasy V Advance, or—actually, all the examples I'm coming up with are from Final Fantasy games—you need to have a very specific party lineup with exactly the right equipment follow a precise strategy with no room for error or improvisation. Otherwise, you won't survive the first round, let alone the entire battle. A difficult fight requiring adaptable strategies is a challenge; a boss like this is a gimmick, and it strains my patience to guess at the exact combination of factors required to reveal that victory is possible in the first place.

All the walkthroughs say this is an easy boss. Just do these seven things that have to be executed perfectly, and he's a cinch. Silly me, I'm only doing six of these things and can't seem to get his health below maximum for more than fifteen seconds at a clip. You'll forgive me if I'm not enjoying blind trial-and-error to see if this strategy will keep me from having to reload the game, spend five minutes reorganizing my party, spend five minutes getting from the save point to the boss, and find out in the first few turns that all my preparations were a waste of time.

But hey, I at least managed to shut off the game without tripping over the power cord, so maybe I'm not a total failure after all.

Playing single-player Mario Party is just terrible. It's a real shame that the only easy way to unlock things is by doing everything yourself, because it's so boring and monotonous. Mario Party 6 is probably my favorite, I don't remember liking 7 as much.

As for everything else, especially the MM7 run, I'm deeply sorry that nothing is going your way! You deserve better than that.

(Sorry to pester you about this, but do yourself a favor and download Mega Man Unlimited. It came out yesterday, and it's so amazing I can't even describe it. It won't help you with your losing problem though, as it's one tough game.)

Agreed about all points related to Mario Party, and thanks for the support! I've had a lot of people mention Mega Man Unlimited to me; I might give it a shot someday, but right now I've got plenty of other games in my backlog, and I've still got a bad taste in my mouth from the 8-bit demake of MM8 as well as 8-Bit Deathmatch—two other games that turn losing into something more miserable than it should be.

Reply

Matt Link

7/16/2013 06:39:32 am

With all this losing, it sounds like it's about the right time for a Rocky styled montage to take place to turn your fortune around. Not necessarily the popular run up the stairs montage from Rocky I & II. I'm thinking something more along the lines of Rocky IV's 80s blood-pumping "Hearts on Fire" theme playing amidst training in the snow in order to build up for avenging the death of Apollo Creed... only instead of Apollo, it's the deaths of the 2 takes of video footage of the MM7 boss rush you're avenging, and instead of Ivan Drago as your opponent, it's choppiness and glitches you're fighting and...

...sorry, this is getting ridiculous, but point being: a montage is in order! :)